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For those that track sleep - how much Deep Sleep do you get? After a 40 mile night ride I slept like a log for 8 hours and woke up (without an alarm) feeling groggy. It feels like I have had too much sleep but i guess it could be dehydration. According to Garmin I only managed 8 mins of deep sleep.
Deep sleep for me seems to vary widely between 5 mins and 2hours. Is this normal?
How much deep sleep do you average as a proportion of your overall sleep?
Is the Garmin sleep tracker accurate? How does it distinguish between deep and light sleep?
thanks
Good question. I also monitor sleep and generally deep sleep varies between 50 mins and 3 or so hours. I find the biggest factor for me is if Mrs King is fidgeting etc then I get less deep sleep and a poorer overall rest. Since we got a puppy (nearly 1 now) my sleep has gotten a little worse due to barking etc but now jsut use ear plugs and that certainly helps.
According to the app I use (Autosleep) I had 2hrs 48mins of deep sleep (44% of my overall) last night.
And the 2 nights before - 3hrs 2mins & 1hr 58mins.
Seems to vary between 0 and 2 hours. Lots of rem and light sleep. Light sleep being the majority.
After a ride you might've been too warm but too tired to wake up to fix it, leading to dehydration. If I do a long ride then I an much hotter at night as my body repairs and rebuilds.
I usually get between an hour and two hours of deep sleep according to my Fitbit app. My overall sleep score is normally either good or excellent.
Garmin watch tells me I get an average of 2h 55m deep sleep.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who occasionally gets woken up by the green light shining out the back of the watch; when the rest of the room in dark, that's a very bright thing!
When I first got my Garmin watch I wore it 24/7 for a couple of weeks to establish a base line set of data. The approx averages are shown below. This was during lock down and I have no kids / pets so I enjoyed an average of 10 hours sleep a night!
Sleep
~7 hrs Light
~3 hrs REM
~5 mins Deep
~3 mins Awake
Resp
12 BRPM Awake
I did record the PulseOx but it showed as dangerously low. I then googled it and apparently the Garmin is rubbish at guestimating this so best ignored.
My tracker seems to indicate after a ride (35 last night) I do not get much deep sleep. It’s the days off I get more deep sleep.
About an hour on a good night.
Mostly around 2h out of 7h
30 minutes last night, out of 4h
Grumpy
Suunto not Garmin
Got a good night's sleep last night (until the bloody cat work me up this morning...), and according to Garmin I got 36m deep sleep, 4:30 light, 2:42 REM and 1min awake.
I use a Fitbit and it typically shows 50 mins to 1h 45mins deep sleep.
Just yesterday I was researching and writing an article about sleep stages, so I can confirm that you should probably be looking for at least an hour of deep sleep. If it's regularly showing just 5mins, I'd be concerned it wasn't recording properly.
Note that deep sleep (aka N3 sleep or short-wave sleep) is typically about 20-25% of total sleep time - and also that it's usually front loaded into the first couple of sleep cycles (so the first half of the night).
It's deep sleep that makes us feel refreshed and recovered, so if you're not getting enough you should feel tired. Even if you had a long-ish overall sleep time.
Disclaimer: this is not medical advice, see your GP etc.
Last nights stats via Garmin after a decent ride were deep 3h 18m, light 4h 25m, REM 35m, awake 2m.
Looking back that's within my normal levels of 1-3h deep sleep and 20m to 1h 30m REM.
Looking back over the last 7 days I have an average of 42 mins deep sleep and 6.5hrs of light sleep according to garmin connect. This is odd - ending week 2 of a dry month and wake up nice and refreshed. Thought I'd get more deep sleep than that...
About 90 minutes a night of light sleep then awake for the rest of the night. Can't doze during the day because waking is too horrible when I realise where I am.
I also use auto sleep and get between 30 mins and 3 hours. What I do find is that if I have an intense mtb ride then I get a lot less deep sleep as I guess my body is busy repairing. Conversely, nice easy rides unto 2 hours keeping in the endurance range HR-wise then I get lots of deep sleep.
According to my Whoop, I was getting about 30 minutes of deep sleep a night, but about 2 hours of REM. I've recently started taking a magnesium supplement and that's pushed the Deep to about an hour and reduced the REM a bit. Made me feel much better too.
How accurate are these things at measuring the type of sleep?
My Garmin stats show about 30-45 mins avg of deep sleep during 7hrs 40mins avg overall sleep.
Seems low compared to most others here but I don't often feel overly tired so must be enough for me!
TJ
How accurate are these things at measuring the type of sleep?
It is bit difficult to verify, devices vary from phone on desk, smar****ch, head band or sensor under mattress. Also there are no standards for sleep data so it is all up to manufacturer to interpret.
I can't vouch for my Withings sensor to be any better than others but it seems accurate from what I have checked (time to bed, wake up and general feeling based compared to amount of sleep). Measurement from single night is not that important but looking at weekly trend is good reminder to focus on getting enough sleep.
And this outdated model works well as a Spotify speaker 🙂
Question...
Is REM not a sub-category of deep sleep? So to understand Deep Sleep total time you’d need to aggregate the two?
Conscious of the use of Averages as well and how outliers can shift the value form an expected norm. Apparently I enjoyed 5h26m of deep sleep last night!!! (Where it normally sits in a range of 30-90mins).
I'm sure I've read you should take those readings with a hefty pinch of salt.
I'm a bad sleeper and I've had nights where I've been awake for hours not able to sleep and the next day my garmin claimed I was asleep for the whole night. It happens a lot. So don't think they are very accurate.
So now i no longer bother wearing my garmin when i go to bed
How accurate are these things at measuring the type of sleep?
The important thing is how reliable they are, I'd have thought - if my Garmin is always measuring the same way I can use that information to try and improve my sleep habits. And I've got no particular reason to doubt it is reliable in that sense. What I very much doubt is that I could use a Garmin one night, then a Polar the next, etc.
I’m a bad sleeper and I’ve had nights where I’ve been awake for hours not able to sleep and the next day my garmin claimed I was asleep for the whole night. It happens a lot.
I think they have a particular issue with differentiating very light sleep from laying down while awake. The deep sleep and REM sleep readings should be more reliable.
Is REM not a sub-category of deep sleep? So to understand Deep Sleep total time you’d need to aggregate the two?
Not to my understanding, but both perform restorative or processing functions (deep sleep physically, REM emotionally).
The sleep cycle goes: N1, N2, N3, REM, wake, repeat a few times, wake up in morning.
N3 being deep sleep.
If you’re a podcast person this is worth a listen. https://podcasts.apple.com/se/podcast/fast-talk/id1490521721?l=en&i=1000496473460
My long term stats are:
Average sleep time 8h 12m
Light sleep 4h 37min
Deep sleep 1h 6min
REM sleep 1h 42min
Interruptions 5% 24min
Fair bit of night to night variability and I generally don't sleep that well after a long ride, probably have best nights sleep after my days off.
9h14m sleep
1h49m was deep.
Seems reasonable, my 7 day average is within 10 mins of both of those.
I think they have a particular issue with differentiating very light sleep from laying down while awake. The deep sleep and REM sleep readings should be more reliable.
Yep, I sometimes wake up and lie there for an hour or so before falling off again and my watch doesn't seem to notice....
Search anything by Matthew Walker loads of great interviews Joe Rogan, Peter Attia, Dan Harris, he's the man that literally wrote the book - 'Why We Sleep'
Average 7 hours sleep and average 53mins of deep sleep.
Looking at my Garmin I seem to get a minimum of 1hr and max of 2hrs deep sleep. Average is 1.5hrs.
Interestingly I always seem to have my deep sleep in the first couple of hours of falling asleep.
Garmin tells me that out of an average 7h45m sleep a night, I get 38m of deep sleep each night and 4h50m of light sleep.
That doesn't seem a lot of deep sleep to my layman's eyes, but I feel fine on it. I suspect the apparent average of just 1m awake each night helps.
Thanks all for input. So in conclusion Garmin sleep not very accurate and the distinction between deep, REM and light even less so? I have found on the connect app a 7 day avg and mine is 34 mins deep, 1hr 52 REM and 5hr 26 light and I feel well rested.
Interestingly I always seem to have my deep sleep in the first couple of hours of falling asleep.
As I posted above, everyone does that.
It's the body's way of making sure you get the crucial recovery stage of sleep - even if you don't have the luxury of 8hrs kip every night.